I was not really surprised but I was amazed at the flack I got from Awate readers at a harmless article I wrote on the trails and tribulations of Barrack Obama. I hope this will redeem my self-esteem and my myopic view of the events that transpired.

After what I have learned to this  day I can reasonably conclude that, Americans, I am sure have never looked up to Brittany Spears for inspiration. If they ever had, I am sure we will be living in a different universe. 

In his book Dreams from My Father, Barrack Obama writes about the inspiration he had at a rally held in support of South Africa. He urged his fellow students to choose sides not between “black and white” but between “dignity and servitude,...fairness and injustice,...commitment and indifference...[and]...right and wrong.”  There is nothing new in these owe inspiring metaphors. But what makes it unique is that it is a fitting tribute to the man and his times. A reflection that his vision and his mission was as acute and his commitment as total even when he was a mere student at Occidental College.

Many said, his being elected to the highest Office in the land was unlikely. That this was unthinkable.  This probability was and still is unlikely for any person of color in a white dominated Society. Statistically the most likely outcome for people of color is being shot in the streets of New York by the NYPD blues, or being beaten to death by the LAPD in the streets of Los Angeles. But then the unlikely began to look likely. That is when the long knives came out.

In an instant, Barrack Obama became the cohort of evil preachers in evil Churches besmirching America. Obama became a terrorist and a relative of Osama. As the sixty-one years old child, Jerome Corsi wrote in his book ‘Obama Nation’. (A word play on abomination) he became an abomination. He became a Moslem cleric, a graduate of the Madrasa of Indonesia. They said he achieved what he did because he was a Black. He became a friend of the enemies of Israel by association with a Palestinian academic.

Oh! It went on and on. They claimed they have seen blacks run for Office before and get defeated in South Caroline. They questioned his patriotism. And when these did not work, they started asking for a thorough investigation of who he is. They recruited some who look like him to sow messages of discord. But those who looked like him ended up being mere microscopic stains on the intertwined and interwoven fabric of progressive's solidarity. And at this time, at this hour, at this very moment, he stood tall. A giant among dwarfs. The man was untouchable. A true Teflon King.

With the help of the young and other progressive white citizens, Barrack Obama got elected to the highest Office in the land , Instead of being, ‘That One’ he became ‘The One’. Not because he was black but because he embodied the ideals and aspirations of progressives everywhere

Here it should be noted that his election did not herald a new beginning. Nor was Barrack Obama the first President of a member of the shunned caste, of the untouchables to be elected to such a high Office. The trend started with the elections of Nelson Mandela in white dominated South Africa, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia.

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But what makes him different is that, Barrack Obama came with a simple message. Change we can believe in and Hope. Here in lies the dilemma the forces of privilege had refused to acknowledge since the advent of the repulsive Thatcher of Britain and the ignominious end of the super reactionary Bush. You see the issue was never one of color the issue has always been one of exclusion. And this is the appeal that Obama commands for the more than four billion people of the World that have been excluded from the political life of our universe.

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If there is anything that makes him unique, it is that the fundamentals of change for the oppressed of the World and the beacon of hope has always emanated from Black America. Black America has always been at the forefront of the struggle for justice, for equality and the struggle against racism at home and imperialism abroad.

Because African Americans are a people who came to the New World not of their on free will but in bondage, they know what it means to be in bondage. What it means to be oppressed, what it means to be marginalized. In sum, what it means to be excluded. That is what makes them the pioneers in the struggle for Democracy. The struggle of African Americans was never about liberating themselves for they were always a free people .The struggle was  about liberating bigots from their bigotry. You see this was the only option open to them to change their fate, to pursue their dreams and their values and their core beliefs.

It is in this context that one has to shape his thinking about what happened in America. America may historically have been a slave owner society. America may have been viewed as the acme of apartheid.  But America is also the country where dreams come true, the only country in the World where anything is possible. A county that is a product of its citizen. The only country in the World where one is a citizen by choice. America has given us home when we lost ours. And it is in this spirit that in spite of its warts and its nodes, America has always been a country of change, a country of innovations and revolution, a country of ideas. An experiment in progress.

Am I being too generous to America? May be I am. But isn’t America a country worthy of generosity? After all it is the most generous country in the world. Even our grand fathers had composed a song about it “Illu zemenca telaeelu, America kidelyeka wie ellu.” Besides, wouldn’t condemning America for every slight nuance and imagined ill bring us down to the level of the Isaias of our World? The very “Natu zey gebers ny indamatu" generation?

The problem we are facing today is therefore not in America but in the most racist corner of the Globe called Europe. Here the exclusion is total. Here the exclusion is brutal. Here people of color are not only non-humans not only sub humans but also simple objects that can be discarded like crumpled paper into wastebaskets.

Politicians in this Continent that once colonized, looted and brutalized other countries can with impunity and  with no legal succor collect—like collecting garbage in the street of Rome— colored immigrants regardless of where they were born and damp them in concentration camps, or force them back to their places of origin with no regard to what awaits them there. Here politicians are elected by succumbing to the basest instincts of their countrymen. They are told (in similar fashion as Lou Dobbs); they are being inundated by outsiders. That their jobs are being stolen by the browns. That their tax dollars are being utilized to subsidize these untoiling masses. In this Continent there is not a single person of color that had achieved any meaningful political status or position regardless of how enlightened he may be, or how enlightened his adopted   Country may claim it is.

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To day, we have seen the promise of America. Today we have been able to live the ‘Dream’. The question is how we translate the promise and the dream to the far reaches of the Continent of Europe. How do we bring down the forces of exclusion to their knees? There is no one to speak for the people of color in their own homeland of course. Their leaders have been compromised, corrupted and discredited. The sole purpose of  dictators like the Meleses, Isaiases, Musuvenes and Mugabes, and Obianges and … (Oh! I could go on and on...) is survival. A survival that had called for unimaginable brutality against the very people who are supposed to be their loyal subjects, because the more of their countrymen leave the Continent the less dissidence there is.

Today in France  a Sarkosy can refer to us as the ‘Scum’  of the Benelux  and in the land of the clown Berlusconi   his Minister of culture Bossi  can jock with impunity, “ Italians don’t want ‘Bingo Bongos’ living there”. Bingo Bongos being we the wretched of the earth. They never seem to understand that exclusion breeds hatred and hatred breeds contempt for the law. Contempt for the law breeds evil and evil breeds terrorism. If only Bush had understood this instead of that infantile ‘they hate us because we are good’, line in his firs term imagine how different our World would be today.

And it is here that if there is anything we are to learn from the election of Obama, it is the Audacity of Hope. It is here if we are to aspire for anything where our ‘Little Big Horn ‘should be. As they say, everyone has his day. Everyone has his Waterloo. We have been out and we have been down, but we are still kicking and we are still around.

Here is where the high stakes in the politics of redemption and identity politics and the crises of expectation that it had ushered in have to be realized. A new thinking and a new era in our Global Community.  Will we at last be able to live the dreams of Che and the dreams of King? That my friends seem to be a rhetoric question. A question that answers itself. ‘Yes We Can’ if we can pull together. Mandela, Morales, Chavez and Barrack have shown us the way; it is up to us to continue the struggle.

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